IDEAS TO LIVE BY from www.theschooloflife.com

Love

October 27, 2011

Dr Thomas Dixon, writer of the excellent History of Emotions blog, recently interviewed Professor of History at Weber State University, and a leading historian of emotions in the United States, Susan J. Matt. Her first book, Keeping Up With the Joneses, was a study of envy in modern consumer society, and her latest work tackles another emotion: homesickness, in a book titled Homesickness: An American History(Oxford University Press, 2011) which explores how homesickness and nostalgia were transformed from deadly maladies to allegedly un-American emotions.

Thomas Dixon [TD]: Hello, Susan, and thanks for talking to us. Perhaps I could start by asking you what got you interested in homesickness?

Susan Matt [SM]: The original impetus was that my own emotional experience of mobility didn’t match up with the mythology of American restlessness. Commentators like Tocqueville and Frederick Jackson Turner as well more modern observers all claimed Americans were naturally restless, that somehow it was in our cultural DNA to leave home. I didn’t find it so effortless or easy to move, and began to wonder if I was alone. Perhaps there was a flip side to American mobility–a hidden history of homesickness. Homesickness also interested me because it seemed in many ways to be the opposite of an emotion I had just been studying–envy. Envy sparks aspirations, pushes people forward, often causes mobility. Homesickness pulls backwards. Both emotions play a role in modern individualism in the U.S.. Americans are encouraged to repress homesickness so they can leave home, be independent, seek more of the world’s goods, act on their envy.

TD: It’s interesting that it was your own emotions that fuelled your desire to revisit their history. I suspect many historians of emotion are in that position. So, what surprised you most about what you discovered when you started digging around in the history of homesickness?

SM: First, how prevalent the emotion was. I thought it would be difficult to unearth, but instead, evidence of homesickness was abundant and easy to find in just about every archive I worked in. Secondly, and perhaps more provocatively, I was surprised at how many Americans died of homesickness, or nostalgia as it was called. I knew there had been European epidemics of nostalgia in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, but didn’t know of American ones. But indeed, the disease of nostalgia was widely known in the United States–during the Civil War, there were 74 deaths from it on the Union side, and more than 5,200 cases of it in the Surgeon General’s records.

SD: It became such a problem that army bands were sometimes prohibited from playing “Home, Sweet Home,” which at that time, was the most popular song in the country. In peacetime, civilians suffered from nostalgia as well. The prevalence and intensity of nostalgia and homesickness throughout U.S. history – from the colonial era to the present - ultimately led me to question whether we were and are the individualists that we are so widely reputed to be. I think we’re not.

TD: I’ve been struck too by the great power of the passions in earlier periods – to cause illness, madness or even death. Medical sources of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries abound with fatal bouts of emotion. Is it possible to pinpoint a date after which this changed – when homesickness and nostalgia became mere feelings rather than powerful and potentially fatal mental conditions?

SM: It gradually disappeared as a dangerous disease in the first half of the 20th century. The U.S. Army provides a useful gauge in its records. One soldier in the American Expeditionary Force reportedly died of nostalgia during World War I. Increasingly during the War, however, many of the symptoms associated with nostalgia came to be defined as signs of the newly established syndrome of shell shock. While the diagnosis of nostalgia stayed on the books up through World War II, and while there were many reported cases of it among soldiers in that war, there were no deaths. In short, from the early twentieth century on, the number of cases of deadly nostalgia declined, although less lethal cases of homesickness continued (and continue) to abound. It seems worth noting that as nostalgia’s cultural meaning underwent this transformation, the tolerance for the acutely homesick declined, since their condition was now seen as less dire.

TD: Historically you clearly have a really fascinating story to tell about nostalgia and homesickness as modern emotions experienced, as all emotions always are, within a particular geographical and cultural situation, in this case in modern America. I wonder what you think about the contemporary importance of this research, and also of research into the history of emotions more broadly?

SM: The history of homesickness explains a great deal about modern American culture and our national identity. Adults in modern America have learned to repress overt expressions of homesickness, for it has come to connote immaturity, a lack of ambition, and failure. It is out of step with the ethos of modern capitalism, which prizes mobility and individualism. However, while they may not discuss their homesickness publicly, in daily habits and behaviors, American make their feelings about displacement manifest. From ethnic groceries that sell the tastes of faraway homes, to sports teams which symbolize loyalty to a hometown, to our addiction to Facebook, cell phones, and emails, Americans routinely show their preoccupation with staying connected to distant places and people. While we may think of ourselves as an individualistic society, our everyday lives suggest otherwise. And our history – full of people suffering and sometimes dying of homesickness - makes clear that mobility has in fact never been an innate trait of Americans. Instead, they had to learn to leave home, and they have still not completely mastered the art of rugged, restless individualism.

The history of the emotions offers historians and the public a new set of tools to assess the past. Rather than merely judging history on the basis of external behaviors, we can bring in people’s motivations and intentions. These often provide a completely different understanding of social life and revises many of our longstanding narratives about national identity.

Dr Thomas Dixon is Director of the Queen Mary Centre for the History of Emotions.

Image: American sheet music of ‘Home, Sweet Home’ arranged for piano and violin, c. 1870s. Source American History Online

September 15, 2011

What is love supposed to be like? How will we know when we meet our ‘perfect’ partner?

Hollywood, in the form of romcoms, has given us very strange ideas about what is appropriate when it comes to meeting and mating with potential partners. The rules which they whimsically lay out for us, through the vehicles of overconfident men and spineless, dithering women, would end up in disaster if applied in real life. For the record, for most non-sociopathic men, if you say you’re not interested, he is going to believe you; don’t be surprised if he actually leaves you alone, rather than showing up outside your bedroom window with a boom box!

When we are looking for happy, compatible, long-term matches, we don’t tend to meet them the way they do in romcoms, whether it is someone whom we have made bets with our friends about, have pretended to have kids in order to meet, or have been found by our 8 yr. old son from a call in radio show.

In this blog, I will discuss two, of the nine important steps, from my course, ‘Finding a Perfect Partner.’ Two important factors to consider when searching for well-suited matches are commonality and proximity.

Commonality is critical in our quest to find a partner. While the well-known saying, ‘opposites attract’ is an old favourite, is it actually true? Probably, not. Instead, it should be ‘attraction increases as similarity between partners increases’. People tend to be attracted to people who are similar to themselves.[1] It is even advantageous to the relationship that our partner also enjoys seven-course tasting menus at poncy French restaurants, or would rather sing karaoke than go to a jazz club. By them sharing similar outlooks and interests, it helps to legitimise our preferences. It also increases the ‘we are on the same wave-length’ appeal or, if you are a die-hard romantic, the ‘soul-mate’ ideology.

Proximity is also important when finding a good match, because when we are near these ‘like-minded’ people, the number of interactions we could have with them increases. Another benefit from frequent sightings of the cutie in red, is that we will like him or her more. Research has shown that we prefer people whom we see more often, even if they are strangers. This is called the ‘mere exposure effect’[2]

So, while commonality and proximity are important factors, the ideal is when they overlap. We often find people whom we have things in common with are already in our immediate proximity. They are sitting at the table next to us at our favorite restaurant, they are doing a downward facing dog in the row behind us at our local yoga studio, and they are in the same queue while buying vegetables at the neighborhood Saturday market. Open your eyes, the people whom you are well-matched with, are doing the same things that you’re doing, and most likely, in your proximity. Your own neighborhood is the best place to begin your search. So this weekend, I recommend sitting outside your favourite cafe: when looking for love, you need to see and be seen!

Jean Smithis a cultural and social anthropologist – an international expert in human attraction, body language and how we flirt with one another. She will be leading 'How To Find the Perfect Partner' on 27 September and 7 November at The School of Life. For more details and to book, click here.

September 13, 2011

I've worked in the field of intimate relationships for nearly three decades. But it was only in 2006, when I was asked to rewrite the classic erotic manual The Joy of Sex, that I fully realised how impossible sex can be.

Because ironically, there was very little joy in much of what I found when researching the book. The sexual revolution, which gave us so much liberty, also opened a Pandora's Box of Furies: more widespread pornography, infidelity, sexual infections; immense pressure to have perfect life-long intimacy; these added to the traditional but still present baggage of embarrassment and guilt.

The conundrum is that we're freer to have sex than ever before, but more than ever faced with double-binds and unhappy endings. We reach out for the luscious apple in the Garden of Eden - unlike Adam and Eve, we're now constantly conscious of the snake in the undergrowth.

Happily, rewriting The Joy of Sex eventually showed me that the above is often a red herring. As I expanded my academic research to interviews with real people who delighted in lovemaking, I also recontacted what you might call the naked truth. I came to understand that for all the current complexity, sex can still be what it always has been - an immensely powerful but nevertheless beautifully simple act. As such, it is absolutely possible.

Much of the work I've been doing of late has been aimed at helping people become aware of that. In particular, I've been presenting and teaching on the positive aspects of sex, on ways to strip away the negative associations. to reclaim what one might call an 'innocent' perspective.

To do this, of course, we need to understand how we've come to see sex as impossible. How society has through necessity fenced sexuality round, and how our current revolution has by removing those fences made everything more complicated. How even the most well-meaning of upbringing leaves a legacy of insecurity and shame, and how, by triggering a deep spectrum of human need, the sexual act makes everything more fraught.

All that once understood, it becomes much easier to separate out what we need to take on board around sex and what we don't; to develop our own sense of what is good and what we don't want to accommodate; to cut through the double-binds and make our own sexual decisions - in short, to make sex a real and wonderful possibility in our lives.

August 30, 2011

Since 2008 I have been the managing editor of Wired magazine, a job I fell into almost by accident. I had clocked up 20 years as a freelance journalist and decided to take a sabbatical year to travel, pause and think about what to do next. I was pretty sure I was going to leave the media world, but first I needed to make some space.

To give the year some purpose I made a rule that I could go anywhere I liked, except that I couldn't use a plane. At first, I didn't travel at all, enjoying London, and especially Hampstead Heath, as is it moved from winter to spring. But in March I took the train down to San Sebastian in northeast Spain and travelled along the coast to Lisbon, and this was where the thinking started to happen.

I have always loved travelling on my own but I have also often found it intensely, almost unbearably, melancholic. I had taken with me Anthony Storr's book 'Solitude', which turned out to be a perfect companion for a solo, and sometimes aimless, traveller. On long walks through the snow-covered Picos de Europa I discovered a calmer state of mind and the difference between being alone and being on your own. In Santiago de Compostela I met a friend and we walked the moss-coloured streets in the rain. And for the summer I enrolled at a Rabbinical college in Jerusalem, travelling there through Europe, Turkey, Syria and Jordan and, then, in the autumn, back by cargo ship across the Mediterranean.

It was when I got back to London from that trip, exhausted and broke but also feeling clean and excited, that I first started thinking about what to do next with my work life. I was still subscribed to an old journalists' mailing list and there I saw the Wired job advertised.

At face value it had little to offer. It was a journalism job and I wanted to move on from journalism. It was full-time and I wanted to work part time. It was a company job and I enjoyed being freelance.

And yet, somehow it kept on calling. In a rather serendipitous way it combined different strains of my work and non-work life so far: journalism, psychology, counselling, human resources, teaching, business – things I had dipped in and out of since leaving school but never really brought together in a single role. I felt, immodestly, that the job had been made for me. And, in fact, so it proved: for almost three years I have enjoyed the company of sociable and creative colleagues; I have been involved in the launch of really excellent print magazine and iPad edition; and I have grown immeasurably as a manager and as a man.

Now, though, it's now time to leave. There's no crisis. I haven't made a big mistake. And I still look forward (almost) every day to going into work. But I also enjoy self-employment and I can feel its call. It could be something to do with the fact that insecurity can make your life simpler. It could be that I will certainly have much more time in my week. Or it could be that, comfortable and happy as I am at Wired, every so often I need to head out into the Great Unknown.

I will be teaching at the School of Life and I hope to be writing more here. But at this stage the only certainty about the future I am about to step into is that it is not certain, and that excites me. Watch this space.

August 24, 2011

Week 3 of The Artist's Way, is all about emotions. The chapter starts with Anger. It continues with further discussion about Synchronicity. I found the passage about Anger extremely synchronous, given that prior to reading it, I had just had a blow-out argument, centered around my struggle to make decisions about what I want, what I need, and what I am striving for, both in this process and beyond.

Helpfully, Cameron explains that Anger is useful, and is there to be listened to. That said, she does note that it is "to be acted upon. It is not meant to be acted out." Oops… Nonetheless, I am glad that the emotional turbulence that surrounds me, has some context, and I am relieved that I'm not an anomaly in my confusion.

In my first post, I wrote that one of my motivations for embarking on this process, was to become unselfconsciously creative, and find clarity around what it is in life that makes me fulfilled, makes me feel excited, makes me feel proud of what I do.

It's a big ask to be honest. Those are big questions. In my case, they are also complicated by the fact that as I write this, I'm sitting in Kaffe 1668 in New York, which means that in the three weeks since embarking on this course, I've travelled to five cities; cities which are all inspiring, creative and full of people and opportunities which all contribute to my decision-making process.

However, despite all that, the biggest thing that's holding me back, is without doubt, me. Cameron spends some time talking about Shame, which I think is deeply tied to self-esteem and confidence. Shame is often what prevents people from pursuing creative projects; "What if my work/my idea isn't any good?", "I can't write about that, it's too embarrassing!", "If I'm not honest, this won't have integrity, and I'm too scared to be honest". They are all understandable fears, but fears that keep us wedded to analytical work, and logic-based activities, which are all very safe. And very boring.

Cameron therefore suggests, that you find a couple people who can nurture and protect your early work. Your prototypes, test-cases, scribbles, stories. They are probably not the people you go to for constructive criticism - that’s a whole different thing - but instead they are simply proud of you and your aspirations, and have the creative and emotional intelligence to help you along.

Throughout all this, Cameron advises you to be nice to yourself. To not beat yourself up, and to accept compliments and nice things from people along the way - things like an invitation to dinner, or new socks. She acknowledges that yes, you will be babying yourself, but that thinking positively, and kindly, will go a lot further towards aiding your productivity; creative or otherwise, than tough-love or deprivation.

Next week, Week 4, is about Integrity. And it requires a whole week of reading deprivation!!!!!! A whole week!! Beyond the books, magazines and newspapers I read, I have at least 50 RSS feeds and hundreds of bookmarked articles that I look through all the time... Help!

Lizzie Shupak is a Digital and Brand Strategist. She is also one half of the international social experience, Wok+Wine. She is currently on a journey of creative discovery, which may or may not affect her biography, in the weeks and months ahead.

June 28, 2010

I love the idea that the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet , the ‘aleph’, is unvoiced. To use it you have to go beyond what you see. An entire language operates without this first letter’s presence being heard – and there’s a great wisdom there.

The second of the ten commandments, the one about no false idols, is very much like the quiet aleph. Focus on an idol, and you have responsibilities to it. It keeps you worshipping money, or your career, or desperate passion. But in all the time you spend bowing to your idols and nourishing them, you have very little left over for anything else.

The aleph is different, as is the second commandment. The aleph can’t be worshipped, for it’s not really there. It’s just a sign of something else. When idols are treated like that, it’s impossible to waste time on them. Instead, there’s no alternative but to turn to the real world beyond them. That’s the ultimate equation for life.

For then, unburdened, you can enter what’s waiting there.

David Bodanis is a futurist, historian, scientist, business advisor and prize-winning author. He will be taking a Sunday Sermon on The Ten Commandments on 11 July. To book your place please click here.

February 08, 2010

As February 14th looms ever nearer, we are compelled to ponder love in all its forms. The love of beasts is a subject we bibliotherapists feel doesn’t get enough press. This Valentine’s Day, find an animal to love. As George Eliot said, ‘animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms'.

Whether it’s the guppies in your fish tank, the next-door neighbour’s cat, or the most exotic monkey in the zoo, find a way to tell the beast you love it. Here are a few writers who have shared their love of animals with the world.

The book that got me panting down this track was Flush by Virginia Woolf. This is a canine classic that describes the companion of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a spaniel of the highest pedigree. Woolf tells the tale through the dog’s eyes, from his arrival at his mistress’s house, to her slow romance with Browning, leading to their marriage and move to Florence. The narrative spans the dog’s lifetime, offering social commentary on the refined Bloomsbury existence of the pampered pooch, as well as his kidnap and grim experiences in the East End. Woolf uses Flush as her window on the confusing world of human romance, and we gain intriguing insights into the Barret Browning households. Love between dog and human is undisputed, and the deep romance between the humans is also explored with great humour and pleasure.

A more visceral approach to the canine crush is Melvyn Burgess’s Lady: My Life as a Bitch. This describes the confusion that follows when a sexually active and rowdy teenage girl is magically transformed into a dog. She experiences all the joy of a dog’s life, from scrounging and stealing food, to finding herself on heat. Her mongrel brain then has to deal with dilemmas over whether it is better to be human or mutt. Burgess explores the horrors of adolescent morality and desire through the device of doggy daring do. It’s a pacey read, gritty and darkly amusing.

A classic of the dog-loving genre is Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. Just after winning the Nobel Prize for literature, Steinbeck felt the call of the road, and set off ‘in search of America’ with his large, ancient French poodle. This novel provides a great insight into the America of the sixties, and the presence of Charley in the books is a gentle, uncomplicated presence. Steinbeck is intensely critical of the America he finds, and at times it is an angry polemic about he small mindedness he encounters, but the book is ultimately life, and poodle embracing.

Let’s not stick entirely to the canine companion. Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea is a classic to be read at least once every decade of your life. This year, read it thinking about the love the old man has for the marlin. The marlin is as big a character in the novel as the old man, and the pursuer’s respect for the fish that he insists on catching is as immense as his love for nature and life. This is a true love story, of the love of the old man for his own nature as a human, and his love for the beast that he must slay.

Gerald Durrell is a man who had a realistic relationship with animals. In his words, ‘Animals generally return the love you lavish on them by a swift bite in passing — not unlike friends and wives’. He loved animals with a vast respect, and played a vital role in the spreading of knowledge about the barbaric practices in zoos of his time, and the need to conserve endangered species. His book My Family and Other Animals, set in Corfu, is the most glorious revel in the joy of natural life, enough to inspire you to keep creatures in all your nooks and crannies, or take off to untamed nature to begin your own romance with Beasts and Beasties.

Talking of Beasts and Beasties, Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White is a perfect book to give to your children to encourage their love of arachnids and porcine playmates. It will encourage them to question our relationship with animals while shedding new light on the marvels of nature – can a spider be beautiful? Even an arachnophobe like me is forced to feel the love of the eight-legged spinner when I re-read this wonderful book.

Finally, for a more risqué exploration of the love of beasts, read The Woman and The Ape by Peter Hoeg. I love it for its descriptions of the ape passing through the streets of London, unnoticed; the ape knows how to hide, but he also uses our mental blindness to his advantage – we don’t expect to see him, so we don’t. More than any of the others, this book puts you in touch with your inner beast.

This reading prescription has been tailored for you by The School of Life's bibliotherapists. For more information about individual bibliotherapy consultations please visit us here.

November 13, 2009

Is sexual liberation over? You may think so, reading Jealousy, the sequel to The Sexual Life of Catherine M. In it, lusty Parisian academic Catherine Millet, who hung out with the whores in the Bois de Boulogne, reveals something controversial: a heart. When her man slept around, she went barmy.

Hypocrisy is the most logical attitude to infidelity, as it fuses many issues, and beliefs about it formed in a world very different to our own. It has a religious dimension. As an infidel betrays God, so infidelity betrays the faith between two people. The assumption is that loyalty in body, mind and spirit are interchangeable. But arguably, people began disapproving of infidelity for a more practical reasons, to stop rows about property.

Avid debauchee Alexandre ‘Three Musketeers’ Dumas lamented, ‘Why is what was called cuckoldry in the seventeenth century called adultery in the nineteenth?’ His answer was inheritance law. Once, first-born sons got it all, then the law changed, giving every child a portion of the estate. So husbands who once worried only about the paternity of their heir grew to fear every cuckoo in the nest. And society grew fiercer about female infidelity, while in men a mistress remained a badge of success.

Female sluts got it in the neck since Eve bit the apple. Katie Price is slated for cavorting with her cage fighter. But male sluts are less tolerated than before. The court of public opinion is still out on randy Ashley Cole, while Cheryl is a latter-day saint for fighting for her love. But for those whose private lives are private, now we have DNA-testing, good contraception, fidelity seems less relevant. With the internet and the liar's friend, the mobile phone, slipping the marital leash is ever easier. Why can't we act on passing fancies without breaching emotional loyalty?

I understand infidelity’s fans. Yet I believe monogamy, with the right person, is the least-worst path through life. Even empty sex threatens a relationship, as nobody can guarantee it will not come to mean more. This belief is less old-fashioned than imagining that mind rules body, like 17th-century rationalist, René Descartes. On the contrary, scientists have found neurochemicals released in sex, vasopressin and oxytocin, mean that where lust leads, territorial feelings often follow. Love and sex, mind and body, are as interchangeable as ever.

February 11, 2009

In the season of romance, as we head out on dates across the city, we should bear in in mind that seduction is never easy when it's a case of seducing someone one actually likes. It is one of the ironies of love that it seems easiest to confidently seduce those we are least attracted to, desire eliciting a crippling sense of inferiority compared with the perfection we have located in the beloved.

Out of this perceived inferiority, there often emerges the need to lie or be absurly reserved: to take on a personality that is not directly our own, a seducing self that can locate and respond to the demands of the superior being we're having dinner with. Does love condemn us not to be ourselves? Perhaps not for ever, but at least initially, for it leads us to ask What would appeal to her? rather than What appeals to me?

Silence and clumsiness can sometimes be forgiven as rather pitiful proof of desire. It being easy enough to seduce someone towards whom one feels indifferent, the clumsiest seducers could generously be deemed the most genuine. Not to find the right words may ironically be proof that the right words are meant. When in the Liaisons Dangereuses, the Marquise de Merteuil writes to the Vicomte de Valmont, she faults him on the fact that his love letters are too perfect, too logical to be the words of a true lover, whose thoughts will be disjointed and for whom the fine phrase will always elude. Language trips up on love, desire lacks articulacy (but how willingly most of us would swapped our tongue-tiedness for the Vicomte's vocabulary).

Seduction is a form of acting, but just as an actor needs to have a concept of the audience's expectations, so too the seducer must have an idea of what the beloved will want to hear - so that if there is a conclusive argument against lying in order to be loved, it is that the actor can have no idea of what his or her audience will actually be touched by. Most of the time, we charm people for reasons we don't entirely understand and cannot fully control. There's no better reason to try to be that most tricky of things on our dates: ourselves.

February 09, 2009

As February 14th approaches, The School of Life’s bibliotherapists asked writers Matt Thorne and Toby Litt to pick their favourite books about love.

If you are in the terrifying position of being madly in love with your best friend, but too scared to confess to it, send them Joshua Spassky by Gwendoline Riley. It features a couple who are clearly made for each other, but they're both too cool and too insecure to make the first leap. Then you'll have to make the first leap. For a book to give your secret Valentine who is unaware of your all-consuming love for him or her, Matt suggests A Certain Smile by Francoise Sagan, the tale of a young woman bored of her lover who begins an affair with an older man; it’s witty, amoral and French. Also Vox by Nicholson Baker, a story of telephone sex, written almost entirely in dialogue -well, it worked for Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. Matt’s all time favourite love story is that of Merteuil and Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which would be a great book to leave on your love-objects desk. Toby suggests John Donne’s poetical works or The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke for seducing your love, either as a gift, or for reading aloud by candle-light in a remote cottage on the coast; and if you want to impress your secret love, give them Ulysses by James Joyce, which Toby holds to be literature’s greatest love story.

Long-term lovers might need a reminder of the all-consuming passion of youth, and First Love by Ivan Turgenev captures that with knobs on. The young hero falls entrancingly in love with a beautiful guest who is politely uninterested in him. The truth behind her indifference sneaks up on the reader like your mum walking in on your first snog. Equally engrossing is The Go-Between by LP Hartley. Seldom has unqualified besottedness been better described; the ultimate loss of innocence is agonizing, but the atmosphere of heatwave-intensified lust and longing will take any jaded lovers back to the discovery of Love itself. For a dose of magic and fate to remind mature lovers of the role of destiny in their own narratives, Four Letters of Love by Niall Williams is one of the most enchanting tales ever to grace your bedside table. Full of lyrical descriptions of the colours of the sea, sky and rain painted by ex civil servant William, who throws his sensible job to the winds in order to capture God’s elements on canvas, this is a complex tale of converging fates that will rekindle the fires in many a long-term union.

If it is, frankly, lust rather than love, and you're a girl, send him In the Cut by Susanna Moore, in which we found one of the most erotic and charged couplings we’ve read about recently. But it has a deeply scary ending, so you'd need to communicate somehow that you're not suggesting things should end up as they do for the characters here (which is very, very badly for the heroine). Matt offers Letters of a Portuguese Nun, by Myriam Cyr (the true story of the first romantic bestseller), or Marry Me by John Updike (particularly if this an adulterous scenario).

If you are a sad or jilted Valentine, lonely and loveless on the 14th February, Toby suggests you curl up with Woody Allen’s Complete Prose to laugh your way out of lovesickness. Matt recommends Ex and the City: You’re Nobody Till Somebody Dumps You by Alexandra Heminsley,- a hilarious account of the numerous ways that Alexandra has been dumped, how she got over it, and the wisdom she can pass on to others on the rebound. He is also a fan of Gwendoline Riley, putting forward Cold Water (or indeed any novel by her) as an antidote to smug coupledom, in which slightly spiky women generally end up preferring to be alone than with men who don't live up to the dream.

Bibliotherapy consultations cost from £35. For information about giving bibliotherapy as a Valentine's gift click HERE. The Love Gift Box shown here costs £60. To view The School of Life's full range of bibliotherapy gift boxes click HERE.